News & Features

President Clinton and Congress reached agreement today on the final portion of the nation's $1.7-trillion budget, the first in three decades brought forth with a surplus and one that offers the biggest peacetime increase in military spending since Ronald Reagan was President in 1985. Both sides...

Pesticide companies have conducted tests on humans and told the Government that they expect to do more, saying the tests may provide more reliable data than animal tests and might justify less stringent rules on pesticides. However, an environmental organization today called on the Environmental...

For years, scientists have been developing pesticides and chemical treatments to fight fire ants, but on any Texas back lawn, it is obvious who is winning. Now, though, scientists at the University of Texas are hoping to fight the ants with the parasitic fly, called the phorid, a creature small...

HOMEOWNERS who use pesticide sprays indoors may inadvertently expose small children to significant amounts of toxic chemicals, even if they follow the recommended safety precautions, a study has found. Dr. Paul Lioy, deputy director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute...

The first rule for a successful round of golf, a Purdue University scientist says, is, ''Don't move anything from the turf to your mouth.'' This will not prevent hooks or slices, but then the scientist in question, Dr. Clark Throssell, is a professor of agronomy, not golf. His concern is advising...

IN a discovery that could help in the effort to guard agricultural crops from blight and reduce the need for pesticides, scientists have identified a genetic trigger that protects plants from disease. Researchers found that it could be used like a vaccine and injected into plants across family...

AN agreement between an international chemical company and environmentalists may help reduce poisoning that has killed thousands of hawks on the pampas of Argentina in recent years. The deaths of members of a broad-winged species called Swainson's hawk were caused by a highly toxic pesticide...

FROM the two-lane road alongside Steve Pitstick's field here on the prairie an hour's drive west of Chicago, the close green rows of six-foot corn look uniform and healthy. Close up, though, a stark pattern emerges: eight shiny rows of corn that look as if they are right out of a seed company's...

There were just 17 wild Schaus swallowtail butterflies in existence, all on a small island, when Dr. Thomas C. Emmel, a zoologist, began actively breeding them. Now their numbers are soaring, and the butterflies are being reintroduced to their native southern Florida habitat. Dr. Emmel...

IN a warning supported by allies who include Robert Redford and Vice President Al Gore, some environmentalists are asserting that humans and wildlife are facing a new and serious threat from synthetic chemicals. These chemicals, they say, mimic natural hormones like estrogen and even in...